The Microsoft Youth Suggests Taxing Fatties for Sitting Still

Someone's had an idea for what to do with a wearable! This comes from a Microsoft development think-tank, which suggests that a health band that punishes people for being overly sedentary by making micro-donations to charity might be a popular choice for people who need to be threatened with punishment in order to be good.

The concept is but one of the most newsworthy things to come out of the Microsoft Research summer camp for extreme nerds, held this year in Kazan, Russia, where youngsters were given the impossible task of having ideas for what to do with the Internet of Things other than turn lightbulbs on and off in rooms and houses you're not even in.

The idea to motivate people to exercise more by having them pay a financial penalty for inactivity was refined from an original concept that would've embedded a lie detector into a wearable to see if people had really been out for their 10,000 steps on the day in question, although presumably the potential for misuse there was deemed a bit strong. [Microsoft Research via The Register]